Search engine optimization spent two decades teaching brands how to win a spot on page one of Google.
Now there is a scramble to figure out how to win a mention inside a chatbot's answer.
Nobody has fully cracked that problem yet. FancyAI is betting businesses will pay to try.
The company has launched what it describes as an agentic social engagement product designed to automate activity across social platforms with the goal of influencing how AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity generate recommendations.
The commercial proposition is significant. Plans start at $499 a month and rise to more than $4,000 a month, putting FancyAI firmly in the category of products asking businesses to make a recurring investment in the emerging AI-discovery market.
Instead of optimizing a webpage primarily for search crawlers, the pitch is to build a broader digital footprint that can influence how AI systems perceive and recommend a brand.
Why This Category Is Suddenly Hot
Search behavior is changing.
Consumers are increasingly asking AI assistants for product suggestions, restaurant recommendations and software comparisons rather than typing a query into Google and working through a page of links.
For businesses that depend on discovery traffic, the implications are substantial.
If an AI system recommends three competitors and never mentions your brand, there is no tenth-place result to fight for. The brand may simply disappear from the conversation.
Marketers have started using terms including "answer engine optimization," "generative engine optimization" and AI search optimization to describe the emerging discipline.
But unlike traditional SEO, there is no mature playbook.
Search engines provide relatively observable rankings. AI systems generate answers, often combining model knowledge with retrieved information and other signals. Their weighting of those signals is not fully transparent.
That uncertainty is creating an opening for companies willing to sell tools designed to influence AI visibility.
Automating the Social Signal
FancyAI's approach focuses on social engagement.
Its agentic model treats activity across social platforms as something that can potentially contribute to the broader digital signals surrounding a brand.
The theory is straightforward: if AI systems encounter more consistent information, mentions and engagement around a company across the open web, that information may have a greater chance of influencing future recommendations.
That represents a different way of thinking about social marketing.
Traditional social strategies are designed primarily for people scrolling through feeds. FancyAI's proposition is ultimately aimed at the systems increasingly mediating what people discover.
Whether that translates into reliable changes in AI recommendations remains an open question.
AI companies do not publish a simple formula showing exactly how much a particular social mention contributes to a recommendation. There is also no equivalent of a Google ranking position that businesses can universally monitor and optimize against.
That makes the opportunity potentially valuable — but difficult to prove.
Businesses Are Already Being Asked to Pay
FancyAI's pricing is an important part of the story.
At $499 a month, the product is already beyond the price of a casual marketing experiment for many small businesses. At more than $4,000 a month, it enters the budget range of serious marketing and agency spend.
That creates an interesting test for the emerging category.
Businesses have spent decades paying SEO agencies and software companies to improve their visibility in traditional search. The question is whether they will make the same commitment to influence AI-generated recommendations when the underlying mechanisms remain considerably less understood.
If AI becomes a major discovery channel, the potential value is obvious.
But so is the risk: companies could spend heavily on tactics that turn out to have little measurable influence on the models generating those answers.
A Crowded, Unproven Field
FancyAI is not alone.
A growing group of companies is developing tools around AI visibility, monitoring brand mentions in chatbot responses and improving what marketers increasingly describe as generative or answer-engine visibility.
The category remains young enough that there is no universally accepted methodology.
That creates both an opportunity and a problem.
Early companies could help establish the practices and measurement standards for AI search in the same way that early SEO consultants helped define search marketing.
But AI companies could also change how their systems source, retrieve and weight information, potentially reducing the effectiveness of tactics designed around today's signals.
For now, businesses have a reason to experiment.
If customers increasingly ask AI systems what to buy, where to eat or which software to use, being absent from those recommendations could become more expensive than testing ways to gain visibility.
What This Means for Miami
South Florida businesses should be paying attention to this shift even without a direct local connection to FancyAI.
Miami has a dense concentration of consumer brands, hospitality businesses, e-commerce companies and service businesses that depend heavily on digital discovery.
Those companies have traditionally competed for visibility through Google, social media, advertising and influencer marketing.
AI introduces another layer.
The question is increasingly not just whether a customer can find a Miami business online, but whether an AI system will recommend it when someone asks for a product, service or experience.
That could create opportunities for Miami's marketing agencies and technology companies as the category develops.
But the $499-to-$2,000-plus monthly price point also highlights the central question facing the entire market:
Can businesses reliably measure the return on AI visibility before they start paying serious money for it?
That answer is still being worked out.
